h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

YES! I actually DO remember that, though I don't think I got it at the time.

The only episode I remember was where two of 'em (sorry, character names elude me) were on a shuttle that was going to crash because it was to heavy, and the computer kept reminding one of them that his copilot weighted enough for him to escape if he shoved him out of an airlock. But he found this little, amazingly dense cube that was the thing put on the ship to cause it to crash, but his copilot was so scared of him he wouldn't come ot of hiding to help him move the damned thing.


And, typically, they all lived happily ever after.

Man, what a great show. Pity no one's heard about it over here. All the think of is Charlie's Angels when I say Blake's Seven.

go figure.

Triv.

Sorry, just thought I'd better change the name of the thread...

TM.

But...I was talking about Blake's Seven...

Triv.

of course, of course. We are all allowed to deviate to the extreme !
But the title still says something like : 'Trekkies' and I am not against Auntie Beeb at all. So why StarTrek Versus The BBC ?

TM.

Didn't it used to be the BBC vs. Star Trek anyway? They showed the series in the wrong order, shifted the times about etc. right from the first run! Still, that's typical of British TV...

It's nothing typically British, they do it in Holland too.
Morons...

TM.

Well, you are bloody lucky to get it in the first place. I think I'm in heaven now that I've moved to SCotland, since I get to see Star Trek a couple of times a week instead of being stuck with just Voyager. I love it.

I think it's a case of the BBC vs. everything SciFi in general at the moment.

I always preferred Blake's 7 to Star Trek. One of the major reasons for which is exemplified superbly by the episode in question. Avon and Vila are in a ship that is too heavy. Orac tells Avon that if he throws Vila out of the airlock they'll be fine. Vila hides, terrified whilst Avon stalks around the ship calling “Come on out Vila!”. There is tension in that episode because Avon WOULD throw Vila out of the airlock to save his own skin.

Should there have been a Trekkie episode with O'Brien and Kira in a shuttle and Majel Barrett tells them that throwing O'Brien out of the airlock would save the ship… not for a moment would we think that Kira would even consider thinking about throwing O’Brien out of the airlock. Hell if spacing the ship’s cat would save them all, they wouldn’t consider it.

Avon is a callous, cold-hearted bastard. And that's why us Blake fans love him.

Right.. I have no clue why those characters were turned into HTML Entities.. but you get the general idea of the post.

O.K. Marwood,

I agree, Blakes7 was a good series. However, I do recall some extremely appalling episodes...as well as some brilliant ones.
So what's the difference with StarTrek ? (To get back to the subject...).

I still think that one should look at the whole sociological background of a series and of the country in which it was produced. One cannot(for instance) really compare American 60-ies SF to British 70-SF. Just as one cannot compare TV-SF to SF-writing(well at least not in a favourable way). Harlan is still a heck of a lot better in print that on the screen).

TM.

Well.. first and foremost I think Brit SciFi is in general superior to its American counterparts. I tend to find that US SciFi is full of tedious moralising.. the worst offenders being Star Trek (particularly TNG onward) and Quantum Leap. This is something Harlan, Straczynski and I are united on.

They also have a tendancy to make their characters damn near perfect. Kirk is the only person to have passed Kobiashi Maru (sp?), Spock comes back from the dead, McCoy finishes the Brain Transplant without help from the teaching machine, Sulu apparently jumps from helmsman to Captain, Riker saves the crew on the Pegasus, Picard kicked the Ferengi's ass, Data is one of few sentient artificial lifeforms, Worf is the only Klingon in Starfleet, Wesley the boy genius, Sisko who survived Wolf 359, O'Brien the best engineer in the UNIVERSE, Dax who is an ex-ambassador, great with a Bat'leth and a kick-ass fighter, Kira who played the freedom fighters game and won, Rom who is thick as three videotapes until someone decides he's an engineer too, Quark who always backs down on his Ferengi double-crossing last-minute and saves the lives of his human friends, Jake the talented writer and journalist. Even ex-con Tom Paris and ex-rebels B'Elanna and Chakotay are happy yes-sir, no-sir Starfleet good two shoes by the middle of season one.

I mean.. how pretenious is the line "Picard is a borg? Never! He was the champion marathon runner at the academy!"

The characters in Blake were flawed, and I like that, because people ARE! Blake is obsessed, Avon is cold-blooded, Vila is an abject coward and a theif, Jenna leaves to become a smuggler, Gan is stupid, Tarrant has a scary perm, Dana is a killer and every man-jack of them would leave the others in the crap if it suited them. Even in Doctor Who, the eponymous Doctor scraped through his exams with 51% on his second attempt.

I also found in recent years that Trekkie plots were becoming unbelievably predictable. From the first 10 minutes you can guess the end. Which is invariably "they all live happily ever after". A far cry from the Doctor standing amongst the massacred crew of Sea Base 4 crying "there should have been another way".. or our heroes being gunned down meaninglessly (no heoric deaths here) in the final episode of Blake.

Brit SciFi seems to be more about good storytelling than its American counterpart.. which seems to be more about pretty visuals and happy endings. How many movies end downbeat? At least the first cut of Generations had something right.. Kirk gunned down for no heroic reason whatsoever.

And a general dislike of Trekkie fans (my apologies to all present) doesn't help. But I have my own reasons for that which I think are perfectly valid.

Of course I'm open to other viewpoints

Mind you, there was *one* ST:TNG episode, where Tasha Yar (a major character) was given a meaningless death just so they could explore how the other characters reacted to death without glory... OK, so they brought her back a couple of times, but hey - that's Trek!

I'd be interested in a valid reason for the general dislike of any group of people connected only by their shared enjoyment of a television show. Any television show.

What is it about Trek that makes you dislike any fan of it?

I agree it is the rare episode that is unpredictable, but the same thing, alas, can be said about much of American television.

Gavroche

Sorry to jion so late, but i've only just got here. There are a lot of points made in this thread that have never been resolved, so i will have a go.
Star trek started at a time when you had the cuban missile crisis (so everyone was thinking oh no were not goting to see out kids grow up) and at a time when civil rights in america were a joke.
It was deliberately designed to provide an upbeat, things can be better, message. Spock was included (and number one as well) so that it had a firmly multi cultural, living in harmony message.
Star trek was deliberately sabotaged by the networks, cos they didn't like it, it was expensive, and they were forced to make series 2.
Star trek has a long history of taking the best practice of "hard sci-fi" as it's starting point for new episodes. This included making any techno device have a plausable design, even if they couldn't build it yet.
This explains why you can now by things analagous to the feinburger (remote sensing of vital signs), the tricorder (cos rodenberry managed to get a clause in his contract withparamount that they would help and support anyone producing star trek technology) and things like the padd (there are now devices that have a pad type of operation using embedded linux, going through to beowulf clusters that do massively parallel processing using functionally identical linux with different optimisations for its purpuses so that any function that you can do on the pad you can do on the beowulf).
The star trek bible came about based on the ideas of heinlein and niven, who started the idea of basing lots of stories in the same universe, and then had to develope the timeline and other memory aids to keep it all consistent.
The TNG series and the stat trek movies came about following the dramatisation of the original series in book form, leading to the generation of a completely new stream of stories set in the star trek universe (it's still expanding). When paramount (who had picked up the rights cheap) found out just how much money they were making from the books, combined with the demographic of the audience, they had no choice but to start production again (using the bible that roddenbery manage to get included as part of the contract).
In the meantime, star trek continued its practice of social commentary, and making thought provoking episodes,as a method of pointing out some of the sillyness of american foreign policy. This is why quiet a few people had a problem with the first series of tng.
TNG introduced to the ongoing nobbling of the american government the idea that when you do something in oen episode, it has consequences. this is why you get the threads featuring Q and latter, the cardassian/bajoran conflict, and added to that the formation of the maquie.
This gave them a good reason to base DS9 near bajor, when they needed to replace tng so that tng could replace the original series in movies.
ds9 with its continuing digs at the problems america caused with its continuing interference in border wars, actually started to drive american foreign policy, and continued the idea of having the plots and the technology well thought out (using the bible for consitency).
It also provided the inspiration for voyager when they started to think of moving towards ds9 movies.
voyager is another instance where they continue to make comments on american policy, while continuing the theme of events and actions having consequences.
The popularity of the star trek series is driven by the fans writing short stories in fanzines, and by the conventions. this resulted in the market for the books, which in turn generated the market for the tv, which in turn generated the market for the movies.
Unfortunately, the people who wrote the star trek fact file do not use the star trek bible. This has resulted in some glaring errors in it, but most of the stuff is relatively aurate,and it is very comprehensive.
As for the revival, there is a totaly new series in the books, which would work quite well as tv.
The problem with the starfleet academy idea (and I am not saying don't do it) is that it has the possibility for the networks to turn it into a place full of wesley crusher clones acting out scripts that could turn in into starfleet 90210 which would be a disaster for the genre.

True, Tasha Yar was murdered in a meaningless way. I always liked that episode. The only thing I'd fault here is that Tasha was killed because Denise Crosby wanted out of the series.. NOT because it was dramatically correct to do so.

But the fact it didn't fit into the plotline made it more surprising than if it'd been set up for two or three episodes...

Okay.. the story of me vs the Trekkies.

I used to be a Star Trek fan. Indeed I used to run a Star Trek fan group. We'd meet in a pub on the last Saturday of every month. We'd have a quiz with prizes and watch Trekkie stories I'd had imported from the States. I also used to write a fanzine.. 30+ pages every month, single handed. I used to charge people £2.50 entrance fee.. this covered rent of the room in the pub, getting the tapes imported, prizes in the quiz and most of the copying on the fanzine.

It was while writing this fanzine that I really realised how shallow I thought Star Trek as a series was. I reviewed the latest video releases each month and found that when I actually looked at the stories in any depth, they fell to pieces. They were superficial.

ANYWAY.. that's a side issue. So... May 1998. The group had been running for 18 months, we had about 20 members. Things were going well. I bought along back issues of all the old fanzines, because many of the new members were interested in buying ones they'd missed. This particular month, I'd missed the bus and was late. So instead of collecting money immediately I just threw a tape on. So we watched Star Trek and we had the quiz and we showed more Star Trek.. and as the meeting comes to an end I start rattling the tin and asking people for money.

"No," they say
I laugh and smile and say, "Yeah, funny, now come on."
"No," they say, "we've seen the videos now. We've had the quiz. We've got your fanzine. What are you going to do?"

ALL of them. Not just a few. ALL TWENTY of them refused to stump their £2.50. They stole all the back issues, they took the prizes and they went home and left me to pay for the pub, the prizes and the copying out of my own pocket.

So I shut the group down. I told the pub not to let them in again and I went home. That is my problem with Trekkies. I'm sure you can see why.

/Mike

Blake's 7 didn't build it up for two or three episodes either. Every regular character in Blake is killed at somepoint through the series. Gan is killed in series A (IIRC) meaninglessly, Jenna and Blake vanish after the assult on Star One in series B. When Blake reappears at the end of series D he mentions how Jenna is dead before he is shot himself. Cally is killed on Terminal at the end of series C. And Vila, Dana, Tarrant and Soolin are killed on Gauda Prime. Avon may be dead.. the last shot we see of him, he is surrounded by a dozen Federation Guards. As the closing credits start we hear gunshots.

The majority of these deaths were the decision of the producer and script editor - not forced upon the series by the departure of a cast member.

/Mike

Avon ducked!